Tracy Alloway

almost a couple of years ago, we've raised something like $15 billion and fairly easily.

On this transaction here, in addition to that, we've got $17 billion.

Now, part of that, roughly about 55% of it is going to be in the form of stock, but the other is cash.

And we got debt commitments from Morgan Stanley and from Wells Fargo and from Barclays and pulled that all together in about a week.

Is synergies, when you talk about the future cost savings, is that a euphemism for layoffs?

No, just the opposite.

Okay.

It's to grow the business.

It's to figure out ways that you can cross-sell customers.

A contractor who is buying roofing and putting that into their construction,

pretty good chance they're going to want insulation in what they're building too.

So we also sell windows and doors, for example, and all of our customers have some exposure to windows and doors.

And we'll be number one in insulation, number two in roofing, number one in waterproofing, and number one or number two in the key geography served within lumber building materials.

There's a lot of cross-selling between insulation, roofing, waterproofing, and lumber.

Wait, say more about that because we hear from executives all the time when they talk about synergies in kind of general terms, but what exactly is, I guess, the low-hanging fruit in this particular deal?

What is it that you're able to do from day one versus what you're able to do in a year or two?

Well, the first thing that we do when we go in to buy a company, whether it's Top Build or anybody else, is we meet with as many people as we can and we ask them to just step back

get out of their normal comfort zone, and think about what would be the perfect circumstances and tools and techniques and repositioning of the company to grow even faster.

Where are their pain points?

Where are things that are holding them back?